A critical response to Nick Jensen’s “Christians and Principles of Civil Disobedience”
Wednesday, 3 December 2014
| Paul Tyson
Mr Nick Jensen, of the Australian Christian Lobby, has recently expressed his unease with the publicized approach to civil disobedience as used by the ‘Love Makes A Way’ (LMAW) campaign. This campaign uses acts of non-violent law breaking (refusing to leave a parliamentarian’s office after closing time) as a means of procuring a publicized protest against our government’s detention of – currently – around 700 asylum seeker children.
I will summarize what I see as the nub of Mr Jensen’s argument.
Mr Jensen argues that only laws that are just are genuinely valid laws, so to break a just law in protest against a law one sees as un-just is to shoot oneself in the foot. Mr Jensen sees laws upholding the property rights of legitimate owners, and laws protecting elected parliamentarians and civil servants from unreasonable disruption in the course of their public duties, as “fundamentally” just laws. Hence, to gain media attention by breaking just laws so as to make a public protest against placing children in detention, seems – to Mr Jensen – opportunistic, to undermine its own logical integrity, and inadequately theologically thought through.
Mr Jensen does not rule out Christian civil disobedience in toto, but he comes very close to insisting that unless the law broken is itself an unjust law, then the normal process of lobbying via the normal legal means should be upheld. In short, Mr Jensen, as a professional Christian lobbyist, seems rather embarrassed by the unprofessional civil disobedience modus of the Love Makes A Way, and sees that approach as crassly buying in to a ‘media circus’ method of seeking to influence public opinion and government policy.
Mr Jensen does not make any serious attempt to address the substantive moral issue that the LMAW campaign is concerned with. Mr Jensen is primarily concerned with formal procedural matters concerning what type of civil disobedience is consistent with upholding just laws. So the scope of Mr Jensen’s argument is very narrow. In what follows I will firstly problematize the terms of his argument, for it is the very narrowness of Mr Jensen’s response to the LMAW campaign that strikes me as the most inadequate feature of his stance.
It is significant that Mr Jensen appeals to Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas in seeking to argue how Christian civil disobedience should be pursued. Unless we have evidence to the contrary, such sources would naturally tend to situate Mr Jensen’s political theology in a broadly ‘pro-Christendom’ camp.
Saint Augustine wrote one of his masterpieces – De Civitate Dei contra Paganos – against a common sentiment in elite Roman society in the dying years of the Classical civilization. That sentiment held that Rome was failing because the emperors had turned from the traditional gods of Rome and become the patrons of the Christian religion. That is, Augustine was an apologist for the new Constantinean arrangement where imperial wealth and power patronised the Church, and in this arrangement the Christian religion was in turn of great political significance to imperial and civic power. Even so, Western Christendom did not shine in its full luminosity until the High Middle Ages – Saint Thomas Aquinas’ era. In Saint Thomas’ day papal majesty and power was stronger than that of kings and emperors. Further, law, moral norms, learning and commerce were governed and enlivened by the Church. Given such a tight synergy between the authority of the Church, civil power, and the moral, economic and class structures of Western society, it is not surprising that the great theologians of that era were mainly concerned with upholding the status quo – it was a Christian status quo after all. Thus, there is very little grounds for any sort of civil (let alone ecclesial) disobedience to be found in the writings of Augustine and Aquinas that is not carefully countered by arguments upholding the formal legitimacy and glorious authority of church and state power within Christendom.
The point I am seeking to establish here is that Mr Jensen is likely to (correctly) see today’s Western culture as embedded in its Christendom past. Hence, a Conservative upholder of the Christian roots of today’s Western society thinks of Church and State as being substantive partners in upholding a distinctly Western way of life, even where formal separations between church and state are carefully maintained. For, indeed, our laws are still embedded in the cannon law of the Church, and our political institutions are strongly shaped by the glories and convulsions of Western church history. Further, liberal secular democratic modernity is itself a theological invention of the West. Indeed, the classically modern distinctions between subjective private freedoms, respectable public norms and objective necessities is deeply cherished by the kind of Conservatism the Australian Christian Lobby is known for. This Conservatism happily combines modern notions of religious and private liberty, with respectable Western values, and with hard Right notions of political and economic realism (a stance which Tony Abbott, for example, is very comfortable with).
A ‘pro-Christendom’ Conservative political theology – such as I am assuming Mr Jensen holds – is going to feel uncomfortable with just about any sort of religiously motivated act of civil disobedience. Right wing Evangelical, Anglican and Roman Catholic civil consciousness is a strong supporter of the respectable status quo it sees itself as a guardian of. Both of our major political parties – both very conservative, very keen to uphold “Australian values”, very pragmatic in terms of pursuing “the national interest”, very pro ‘border protection’ – are entirely at ease with that status quo, and expect strong electoral support from conservative Christians. Such conservativism is not going to read – for example – Leonardo Boff’s liberation theology. Our pro-Christendom, embedded conservatism does not have the life experience or the theological perspective that will lean it towards moving outside of the established rules of engagement upheld by the status quo, and siding with the oppressed and the marginalized against the respectable and the powerful. Even so, aspects of this pro-Christendom stance do have, I think, an important role to play in Australian public life.
I want to suggest that a dialectical relationship should be upheld where—to swing to Old Testament terminology—a ‘priest and palace’ mentality needs to co-exist uncomfortably with a ‘prophetic’ mentality. Both outlooks have their strengths and their limitations, but it is often not very helpful for one ‘side’ to judge the other ‘side’ by criteria it would use on itself. That is, I think the Church should try and walk and chew gum at the same time. Some should seek to influence power via established means, in recognition that there is indeed much Christian heritage in today’s Western political institutions and way of life. On the other hand, others should attempt more radical critiques of respectability and established power. For both the Scriptures and Church history clearly teach us that the ‘priesthood and the palace’ does regularly fall to the idolatrous pursuit of debased vested interests that favour the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the poor and marginal – under the cloak of piety, respectable morality and legal legitimacy.
It seems clear to me that Mr Jensen has applied a ‘priest and palace’ conservative criteria of effective and valid lobbying – which he himself is comfortable with – to Christians seeking to exercise a more prophetic challenge to the status quo itself. Mr Jensen’s attempt to produce a universal Christian principle of valid civil disobedience does not recognise the bias of his underlying status quo affirming political theology, which certainly governs how he approaches lobbying, and probably shapes his thinking on the substantive issue LWAM is concerned with far more than he has admitted. And it is to that substantive issue that I would now like to briefly turn.
LMAW maintains that the Australian government’s policy of detaining hundreds of children of asylum seekers for, on average, 400 days each, with no certainty regarding the outcome of their ordeal, is unconscionably immoral. Further, all Christians and all Australians of good will should strenuously oppose the policies and laws that our governments have implemented in order to create the present situation. LMAW notes that the normal modes of political advocacy that could be used to address this situation have failed because the inhumanity of our policy has bipartisan support in our major political party blocks. Some attempt to speak directly to the Australian people needs to be made, some attempt to make this inhumanity a real political issue in the Australian public needs to ventured. Harmless acts of civil disobedience are symbolically significant as measures of political desperation, and as a means of generating public interest in the matter. But the real point of the exercise is not about civil disobedience, and it is not about the LMAW activists, it is the substantive moral issue of locking up children in degrading and increasingly hopeless (regarding asylum claims) situations.
Mr Jensen has not convinced me that our lawmakers who pass laws and pursue policies that abrogate our national responsibilities as signatories of the Refugee Convention are enacting just immigration laws. Contrary to that Convention, in this century our law makers have criminalizing boat arrival asylum seekers, have refused to process and settle legitimate refugees, and have locking them all up (including their children) in designedly ‘discouraging’ and hopeless conditions. How could this be just? Short of violent confrontation with the guards and police (which a commitment to non-violence rules out), no means of resisting that injustice directly is open to Australian citizens, so some other form of resistance needs to be attempted if the matter is a serious offense against the standards of justice God requires of us, as is strongly indicated in the above sited Bible verses. To that end, Love Makes A Way is doing the best it can to prophetically challenge a degraded status quo. I wish Mr Jensen well if he is seeking to change immigration policy via what he deems appropriate and ‘respectful’ (through the aforementioned established means), but I think the time for a prophetic disregard for the false dignities of unjust law makers has now well and truly arrived in Australia.
Dr Paul Tyson is an Honorary Assistant Professor in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham (UK).